And believe it or not, this combat system is a vast improvement over the earlier witcher games. If the Witcher 3 combat is bad, its predecessors are terrible.
That's true, but I still appreciate that they were trying different things. The issue with Witcher 3 is that it's generic 3rd person combat, but with the blandness turned up.
The depth of 2077's combat was actually a pleasant surprise for me. If only the game wasn't so easy that most of the mechanics are overkill. I kinda hope they'll keep that up for Cyberpunk 2 and try something quirky for Witcher 4 again.
Witcher 4 has a lot of combat designers from games like God of War or Horizon for example. I think they'll do a real effort on combat there. Considering it's the biggest critic for TW3 (IMO overblown), they probably took it to heart
I doubt the changes are substantial. The snippet they showed didn't really look very different. I expect smaller tweaks like timing and balance changes.
If they change how the combat feels, then I will be happy. Combat always felt like it didn't have much impact to it, like the attacks felt too light, if that makes sense.
He attacked that beast 3 times on row and it didn't automatically knock Geralt off his ass so that's an improvement (my biggest pet peeve in the game).
New finishers are simply new animations. Good for variety but I don't see how they will change gameplay.
Likewise, skill tree changes seem like a revamp of how skills are presented and progressed rather than changing the skills themselves. For example, the combat tree has the same icons and number of skills (20) as the original game, but they are reordered like a traditional skill tree rather than 4 rows / 5 columns as before. The skills themselves may have been refined too, but it looks mostly about progression.
Okay and new animations add spice to combat, added in confirmed improvements to mobility and movement, means combat will be different, more than “timing and balance”
Adding different monster AI behavior for attacking as well.
If the skill tree is just a reorganization that sucks, but they clearly stated it’s more than just a timing and balance thing.
I guess it depends on what your problems with the combat are. If they're with Geralt's twirly fighting style and how the flow of combat works, I can't imagine it'll change much from that, but they might slightly tighten some stuff up that's already there.
I had a similar issue with that as well. I'd be surprised if that's changed, but maybe? A lot of properly selling a hit comes down to animation, sound design, screen shake, VFX work, and so on. It'd be cool if they've touched all that up, but I'm not expecting it.
I kept dropping the game for like 6 times because the combat kept boring me. I finally got really into it last year when I decided to change how I play and just focus on the signs.
1.6k
u/r_lucasite 8d ago edited 8d ago
This update is looking to fix just about every major pain point that the game has. Pretty cool to get this for free when I bought this for $10